Introduction: Interview with an author

Who are you?

I am Susan Maxwell, an author who dreams of one day having a readership that outnumbers family members. 

Tell us about your writing. 

Some of my writing is fantasy (especially those works accessible to younger readers), and some Gothic, but the terms I feel most at home with, and am particularly interested in exploring, are slipstream and irreal. Both terms refer to a sensibility rather than particular genres or tropes; a sensibility of otherness, of defamiliarization, and disruption. Irreal (at least, according to The Café Irreal) adds to these characteristics the rejection of realistic characters, and a preference for undermining reality over resolving the story. Both slipstream and irreal cite some of the same authors as influential or canonical—Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, and Clarice Lispector. The Café Irreal also includes Kobo Abe, while a 2007 Readercon panel drafted a “working canon” of 115 slipstream writings, including works by Thomas Pynchon, Italo Calvino, Shirley Jackson, Virginia Woolf, and Ursula le Guin. 

I also write poetry, and some non-fiction. The non-fiction includes book reviews (e.g., via BookSirens, or for Inis, the magazine published by Children’s Books Ireland), and some academic work. I was awarded my PhD in 2017; my thesis examined the conceptualisation of ‘marginality’ in archival theory. I research independently, and my areas of interest are broadly connected to the relationships between the archives and literature, and concepts of the archives, of margins, and ‘the other’ in literature, especially fantasy or irreal, and predominantly—though not exclusively—in the Modernist and late Modernist era. 

And I also engage in literary and critical activties other than actually writing. For the past couple of years, I have been a member of juries (both fiction and non-fiction) for the British Fantasy Awards. It was a great opportunity to read new writing. I learned a lot from the process, and really enjoyed the change of scenery from peaceful isolation to engagement with like-minded, well-informed fellow panellists. *More of this sort of thing in the future*

How long have you been writing?

The first thing I recall wanting to be was an illustrator. Actually, really I wanted to be Sherlock Holmes, but even I could see certain difficulties there, so as second best, I wanted to create worlds by drawing them. I did not attempt to pursue art as a career (mainly because I suspected that I would end up being a teacher, which would not have been good for anyone involved), and realized that I was far more likely to master the skills for writing.

The first thing I recall writing was a school story, when I was about twelve, because I was in bed with some illness and was bored. A sibling, who also writes, was very kind about it, though I remember my mother saying rather faintly that there were an awful lot of characters in it, so I set fire to the school and killed off about a dozen.

I wrote my first full-length book when I was about fourteen—a time-slip adventure involving a character who was brought back, by means of a radio and a card-game, to World War One, where they had to … I don’t know, rescue someone, but why or from what threat, I can’t remember. Someone got killed in a plane crash. And then one of the historical characters travelled forward in time. It was called A Foreign Country, from the L.P. Hartley quotation about the past being a foreign country. I did illustrations for it, too, but I don’t think they survived. 

I wrote a lot of poetry in my twenties, and my enthusiasm for ‘the book as material artefact’ was enormously satisfied when another sibling typed them all up (deserving two medals for negotiating my handwriting, which was even worse then than it is now) and had it spiral-bound. I was so pleased with it, I kept taking it out and looking at it. 

Why are you setting up this blog?

Only so much can go into the books, and I have always been attracted to ways in the which literary worlds can be extended, to what you might call paratexts. The blog will be a paratext for the secondary worlds presented in my books, but also for the processes of creation—the influences and decisions that are precursors to the finished, polished, end result, whether written or painted. It takes a while for potentiality to be filtered into decisions about what I will create. Very often I will write a pretty awful first draft, with the intention of creating only the roughest approximation of what needs to be said, and then leave it for a while, so I can think about it. It is an interesting, if frustrating, process, and I would like somewhere to put at least some of it. 

Why independent publishing?

On the day that I started writing this post, I received a book from Galley Beggar Press. It was Toby Litt’s A Writer’s Diary. The bookmarks that accompanied it were very a propos: “How do you know the voice of doubt isn’t bang on? You don’t.” “How do you know your agent doesn’t make bleugh faces to their assistant when you’re on the phone? You don’t.” “So, do you stop all this nonsense right now? Do you quit? You don’t.”

I have been creatively productive for a long time now, and have been submitting the results to publishers, exhibition-curators, and competitions for a long time, too. This was partly an impulse to get recognition, or to join particular kinds of conversations, or—like buying a lottery ticket—to have the outside chance of making a living from it (music to the ears of someone whose preferences require independent wealth, but whose bank account begs to differ). Every now and then something would be accepted, but mostly things were rejected. 

Independent publishing is not just an alternative to traditional options that are not available for whatever reason. It is at once a gesture of resistance, and a gesture of faith. It offers resistance to all the factors that have led to a particular writer being out of tune with the industry; resistance to an economic ideology that devalues everything that cannot be reduced to monetary exchange; resistance to profit-driven publishing that leaves little space for the sort of quality-driven publishers who re-mortgage their houses to realize their vision, and lie awake worrying about the rising price of paper. 

Independent author-publishing is also a gesture of faith in one’s own writing, as something intrinsically important. If ‘the mighty oak was once a little nut that stood its ground’, then the independently published book is a monument to an individual’s insistence on making meaning in a possibly meaningless world, and a two-fingered salute to a political environment fundamentally hostile to creativity for its own sake. 

And your publishing name?

In 1863, the Paris Salon rejected so many paintings submitted for its annual exhibition that the artists—including Manet and Whistler—and their supporters protested. Emperor Napoléon III ordered that the rejected paintings be exhibited elsewhere in the same building, in a Salon des Refusés, the “room of rejections”. The Impressionists reused the ‘Salon des Refusés’ several times subsequently for their own exhibitions, and many—though not all—had successful careers outside of the official Salon. 

Hence, the Bibliothèque des Refusés. 

So, these books of yours—what are they? Where can I buy them?

Well, the short story collection Fluctuation in Disorder and the novel Hollowmen are slipstream works aimed at an adult rather than a universal readership. The former is available as both e-book and paperback, but the latter only in print, as it contains passages that rely on visual formatting that could not be modified to work with reflowable text.

My three novels set in the fictional 'Hibernia Altera' universe are suitable for anyone who can read them. Good Red Herring (published by Little Island) and A Wild Goose Hunt are part of a series, The Muinbeo Chronicles, set mainly in the rather 'otherworldly' land of Muinbeo, which borders on the imaginary Ireland of And the Wildness, the first of the Flux Avellana series. These are all available as e-books and paperbacks.

The best place to get further details of the books themselves and where you can buy them is on my website. Where you can also find out a bit more about me and what I am up to, if you are so inclined…